Florida DUI Law and Open Source

"A Florida court this Friday will hear arguments in a case where the accuracy of a breathalyzer is being scrutinized because the manufacturer refuses to release the source code. A state court ruling last year said that accused drunk drivers are entitled to receive details about the inner workings of the "mystical machine" that determined their guilt, and defense attorneys are now using that ruling to open up the device's source code.Is this part of a larger trend? With software bugs being a fact of life, consumers and organizations could claim that they need to be able to verify an application's source code before they accept that their calculations are accurate. Think credit card transactions, speed detecting radar guns, electronic voting machines."

Lawyers in Blogland From the Florida Bar

"Law blogs are exploding and Florida lawyers are in on the action

By Jan Pudlow
Senior Editor

Armed with a Dummies book on html, a software program called “Blogger,” and plenty of curiosity, St. Petersburg lawyer Matt Conigliaro set out to write the code for a legal blog he could call his own.

For two months in the spring of 2003, on weekends and in the middle of the night, he hunched over his computer fine-tuning Abstract Appeal, billing it as “the first Web log devoted to Florida law and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.”
Then he set it free into the blogosphere.

Little did he realize that because of his blog, he would be quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and CourtTV.com during the raging controversy of the Terri Schiavo end-of-life case. "

Best Place to Get DUI

"In Fairfax, where General District Judge Ian O'Flaherty has resumed dismissing drunk driving charges on the grounds that the state's presumption of intoxication at .08 blood levels or above violates the constitutional right to a presumption of innocence."

DUI Manslaughter Case (DUI Tampa Lawyer)

"A Stuart man charged in the December traffic death of his fiancee pleaded no contest Monday to DUI manslaughter and other charges related to a single-car crash on Willoughby Boulevard.

[He] was expected to begin a trial Monday, also pleaded no contest to two charges of DUI with serious injuries and driving with a suspended license involving death, court records show."

DUI and Open Source Software

'I'm not drunk, your software is'

Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com 20 Oct 2005

"A Florida court will hear arguments on Friday in a case where the accuracy of a breathalyser is being scrutinised because the manufacturer has refused to release the source code.

Lawyers representing more than 150 defendants who have been charged for driving under the influence of alcohol in two Florida counties will file the request.

They argue that they have a right to see the source code of the alcohol breath analyser that was used to determine their clients' guilt. . .

A Florida court will hear arguments on Friday in a case where the accuracy of a breathalyser is being scrutinised because the manufacturer has refused to release the source code. . . They argue that they have a right to see the source code of the alcohol breath analyser that was used to determine their clients' guilt."